[Fearts]

Pinion just sent out a second email. It obvious they are worried many people will drop their service, as they should be.

Spoiler

Dear communities,

We announced some pretty radical changes in our last email, and since then we've heard from a lot of people with questions
around why things are changing. Hopefully we can clear some of that up.

Pinion started with a bold vision to make running a gaming community possible without outside funding - something nobody
before or since has managed to achieve, let alone sharing that recipe for success with any and all communities. Although
every business starts off unprofitable, we were confident that as advertisers learned more about the unique value of what
we could offer, our revenues would lift to the point where we, too, could exist without outside funding.

However, as we've learned, the advertising world is slow to adjust. In the world of video advertising the only thing that
matters is completion rate. No matter what we say, as soon as they hear the word "video" it's like "great, what's your
completion rate?" Bad completion rate means we don't get paid much for the ads we show, means we need to change
the model to one which works.

We're not going down without a fight, and we're hoping that you'll come and fight by our side. We just need to get those
completion rates up to the point where advertisers are paying us what the space is worth. Once we get to the other side
of this, we’ll all be better for it. These changes will enable us to pay more money to those of you that get higher
completion rates. We love seeing our partner communities thrive, but we can’t keep making that happen unless we make
this change.

We've already been working hard on initiatives (such as the Pot o' Gold and the new MOTD layout) to raise completions.
But we need to do more, and that's where the forced completion comes in.

Some of you are concerned about the effect that forcing an 85% completion will have on player numbers. So are we.
Some of you are worried that you won't be able to keep completions up any other way. We're right there with you. Pinion
was built for you guys, the communities, and you're still the foundation of what we do. We can't win this without you.

So we'd like to invite any interested communities to join us in creating a Pinion Community Council. This isn't a glamorous
job, nobody's getting any fancy cars or being flown anywhere in a helicopter, but stepping up for this role means a
chance to help guide us to do right by our communities in this critical time, and importantly also to lead your fellow
communities by finding ways to make the best of the completion-obsessed landscape we now find ourselves in.

If you're interested, drop a reply to this email telling us why your community should be on the council. We're not sure exactly
how many we're looking for at this stage, but if we get too many we'll have an election to keep it fair.

This has been a challenging year for us, but from where we're sitting things can only get better. We have a great team
working here, a great group of companies behind us who love the idea of what communities do, and want to provide
quality media in your servers. We've got great technology ready to take the advertising world by storm.

Pinion has gathered the support of hundreds of communities, Valve themselves, GSP's across the globe, Microsoft, incredible
investors, fortune 500 companies wanting to advertise and countless volunteers for this initiative. With your help, surely we
can get gamers worldwide to appreciate the effort and financial weight of making community infrastructure available to
support them. In exchange, we are asking that they support us with a few seconds of patience.

Some players will winge, some always do. We would appreciate everyone uniting together to respond to anyone complaining
on forums, to let them know why we (Pinion and communities) need to do what we're doing. On another note, we're upping
the ante on Pot o Gold, and have been working hard on a partnership with Razer, which will see tonnes of awesome hardware
going to gamers each month after they watch an ad.

gg,

The Team and Pinion

[GIANT_CRAB]

I might be dropping pinion despite their PART II email, there's really no point to it.

[Happy DODs player]

Same problem here, build up the community with these fundings to a stable one.

Losing pretty much atm 40% on Pinion counts kicks in very hard. Will need to see if i can get my gameservers

up and running.

[Smarmy]

Well you have to remember too, and I've always been aware of this, that you have a lot of players simply not joining your servers or leaving once they see you're forcing them to watch an advertisement. Even if it's only 5 seconds some players just won't play on your servers due to a principle. I was willing to lose a few players that way because I knew 5 seconds just didn't affect me that much and I knew it wouldn't affect others.

However, there are a lot of players who crash even now because of the advertisements. I've had 3 or 4 people the past few days complaining about it. When I suggest they disable their HTML MOTD and they do, they then no longer crash on our servers. I've been seeing comments like "I only crash on your servers during map change" and it goes away with the HTML MOTD disabled. So, I'm just not willing to make people wait longer than 5 seconds. Combine that with the crashing issues and reported FPS drops and it's just not worth the hassle any longer.

I don't want to risk pissing so many players off and still having a very good chance we won't be paid in the first place, due to not meeting their 60%. It seems larger communities may not be impacted as much by this but our community is medium sized and I'm just not willing to risk it. I know Pinion is probably caught in a bad spot and doing what they must. They're just no longer a viable option for us.

[Zephyrus]

pinion shall fall

[Nolongerinthegame]

Originally Posted by Dr. McKay I would tend to agree, but the server has to be paid for somehow. Ads are a good non-intrusive way to pay for servers.

You have to remember other communities got big without using adverts and people are happy to donate. Years before pinion even came out, some communities were getting plenty of income.

I saw some people complaining ages about the TF2 quickplay not working one time. Saying their communities will die off over night if they cant get the traffic. Do they have any regulars or just relying on random traffic all the time? Thats not how to get a server populated and keep it that way. Again before TF2 quickplay, other communities managed fine.

Of course pinion was helpful in covering costs but now the rules have changed.

[Horsedick]

Originally Posted by Smarmy Well you have to remember too, and I've always been aware of this, that you have a lot of players simply not joining your servers or leaving once they see you're forcing them to watch an advertisement. Even if it's only 5 seconds some players just won't play on your servers due to a principle. I was willing to lose a few players that way because I knew 5 seconds just didn't affect me that much and I knew it wouldn't affect others. However, there are a lot of players who crash even now because of the advertisements. I've had 3 or 4 people the past few days complaining about it. When I suggest they disable their HTML MOTD and they do, they then no longer crash on our servers. I've been seeing comments like "I only crash on your servers during map change" and it goes away with the HTML MOTD disabled. So, I'm just not willing to make people wait longer than 5 seconds. Combine that with the crashing issues and reported FPS drops and it's just not worth the hassle any longer. I don't want to risk pissing so many players off and still having a very good chance we won't be paid in the first place, due to not meeting their 60%. It seems larger communities may not be impacted as much by this but our community is medium sized and I'm just not willing to risk it. I know Pinion is probably caught in a bad spot and doing what they must. They're just no longer a viable option for us.

At this moment I'm awaiting to see what the configuration changes will look like and go from there but I'm with you here 100% - not sure if I intend to keep them or not and I have it running on 15 different servers so my income from them has been good but trending downward cause of the drop of TF2 players lately. I only see large spikes after a nice fat update which Valve should know by now without those updates and content additions the game will die - as it is now the updates are like a defib to a heart attack victim as it is with Pinion.

[Zephyrus]

i dont think tf2 is declining, its more like everyone wants to make money out of running servers and there are so many that a single server only gets a few players at a time, just saying on steam stats tf2 takes the 2nd place for the most popular game on steam

[GIANT_CRAB]

Originally Posted by Zephyrus i dont think tf2 is declining, its more like everyone wants to make money out of running servers and there are so many that a single server only gets a few players at a time, just saying on steam stats tf2 takes the 2nd place for the most popular game on steam

I will be disgusted by these server owners who insist on forced advertisements.

[Smarmy]

Originally Posted by nelioneil You have to remember other communities got big without using adverts and people are happy to donate. Years before pinion even came out, some communities were getting plenty of income. I saw some people complaining ages about the TF2 quickplay not working one time. Saying their communities will die off over night if they cant get the traffic. Do they have any regulars or just relying on random traffic all the time? Thats not how to get a server populated and keep it that way. Again before TF2 quickplay, other communities managed fine. Of course pinion was helpful in covering costs but now the rules have changed.

The landscape is a little different now. A lot of communities got a huge leg up on communities created before and after Quickplay. Now there are a lot of servers in general. I'd guess a lot of that happened when TF2 went F2P and the demand for more servers went up. I'm just saying, you can't compare what it was like to obtain players before the Quickplay system when there were fewer servers and today with so many communities players can latch on to after discovering them via Quickplay.

The method to getting a popular server now is grabbing their attention the first time they join your server through Quickplay so that they favorite you and come back. A lot of players I'm betting are content on just slapping that Quickplay button each time they load up. If you want to be a community that brings players back you have to do something unique. Otherwise you just risk being another Valve server that players continually pass through.